Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won a resounding victory at the polls on March 17th. His party Likud will have an expected 30 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, compared to 24 seats for its closest competitor, the Zionist Union. As a result, Mr. Netanyahu is in the strongest position to form a new right-of-center coalition government.

After seeing their hopes for regime change in Israel go up in smoke, Obama administration officials have been attacking what White House spokesman Josh Earnest called Mr. Netanyahu’s “divisive rhetoric” during the election campaign. They did not like that the prime minister rejected a two-state solution as they envision it should be designed. They were unhappy with likely plans by a new Netanyahu government for more settlement construction. And they objected to the prime minister’s last minute efforts to rally his supporters to come to the polls by telling them, in a video posted on social media, that they could lose the election because “Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.”

A decade ago ISIS was on the front page of every major newspaper. Then Obama won and declared victory over Al Qaeda and it went away. ISIS, then Al Qaeda in Iraq, didn’t actually go away, but the administration and its media allies began pretending that it had.

Forcing Americans to vote under threat of legal penalty would help to fundamentally transform America, President Obama told a town hall-style meeting in Cleveland yesterday.

It is the latest radical leveling scheme that flows from the president’s totalitarian impulses. It is also consistent with his support for “Net Neutrality,” which is a form of censorship and his opposition to the landmark Citizens United decision that affirmed a conservative activist group’s constitutionally guaranteed right to make a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. It is an assault on American democracy itself because one of the ways that people express themselves politically is to stay home on Election Day. Compelled speech is not free speech.

As vote tallying came to a close Wednesday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party emerged as theclear victor in the Israeli election, besting the runner-up Zionist Union party headed by the Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and his running mate, Tzipi Livni. As a result, Netanyahu has gained the upper hand in forming the country’s next coalition government.

The election reflected polling done in December, when Netanyahu appeared to have a comfortable lead following his call for new elections, due to opposition within the current coalition government. Just prior to the election, however, Netanyahu’s Likud party trailed the left-of-center Zionist Union, a party whose platform centered around a wish to resume negotiations with the Palestinians. If they had emerged victorious, Herzog and Livni would have split the four year term, with Herzog serving the first two years and Livni the second two.

Feminism originated as a struggle for equal rights. It started with voting rights, then expanded to include the dismantling of laws and customs that assumed women were incapable of running their own lives, and so had to be subjected to male overseers. The goal was to achieve for women their autonomy in world with a level social-economic-political playing field. In short, feminism was about achieving the liberal democratic good of individuals with autonomy, human rights, and the equality of opportunity to rise according to their abilities.

Shifting social mores, technological innovations, and an expanding economy laid the groundwork for the triumph of what is called “equity feminism” starting in the 1960s.